PolicyBazaar to raise Rs 300 crore at valuation of Rs 1,200 crore

Online insurance aggregator PolicyBazaar is closing a Rs 300-crore financing round led by PremjiInvest, the family office of Wipro’s Azim Premji, with another new investor, Steadview Capital, coming on board, sources close to the matter said. Existing investors Tiger Global and Ribbit Capital have also participated in the latest fund-raise, which values the company at around Rs 1,200 crore post the investment.

New York-based Tiger Global, the most prolific backer of India’s booming internet economy, will now hold 30% stake in PolicyBazaar, making it the largest shareholder in the financial tech venture. Existing investor, internet firm InfoEdge, which runs portals like Naukri.com, and Temasek, the investment arm of the government of Singapore, may put an additional Rs 100 crore in the Gurgaon company, sources said.

In May last year, PolicyBazaar had raised $20 million in a round led by Tiger Global, which in all has put around $40-50 million in the six-year-old venture. Early investors in PolicyBazaar, like Intel Capital, have made some secondary sale of shares to Tiger. Inventus Capital and Intel are not participating in the latest financing round, sources said.

PolicyBazaar, which retails insurance products online, has to adhere to the 51% Indian ownership cap as stipulated by the government for the insurance sector. When contacted by TOI, Yashish Dahiya, co-founder of PolicyBazaar, said the company was still a few weeks away from closing the fund-raise. “We saw a very high level of interest from foreign investors but due to regulations around FDI they could not be accommodated in this round.”

Gurgaon-based ETechAces Marketing and Consulting, which runs PolicyBazaar and PaisaBazaar.com, was started by Dahiya, Alok Bansal and Avaneesh Nirjar in 2008. The funds will be used in educating Indian consumers about insurance through extensive use of mass media, Dahiya said.